I want and recommend that people focus on interesting, curious conversation, motivated by the desire to learn about the world and relate to others. This requires letting go of the feeling that you need to battle opposing positions that are wrong and bad. (Why? Because the two states are mutually exclusive.)
I know it's super hard to disengage from the latter, but we should, because (a) it spoils this site for its intended purpose, and (b) it's an illusion. It's not true that the world will be a worse place if you don't engage in ideological battles on internet forums. In fact it will be a better place and HN itself will be a better place.
Don't worry about the effect on HN of focusing on the delights of curious conversation. The distribution of commenters who come to that (happy) choice is random across the ideological spectrum, in my experience. You needn't worry about ceding HN to the socialists or whoever.
The distribution of commenters who get stuck in the embattled state is also randomly distributed ideologically, in my experience. I don't know if it counts as ironic or not, but the commenters who argue with each other most fiercely resemble each other more than they resemble anyone else.
Of course, if other commenters continue to break the site guidelines by posting generic ideological battle-style comments, you can downvote and/or flag those comments and move on. In egregious cases, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll be happy to take a look.
But please don't just flag or report the cases you disagree with—people tend to do that (i.e. report cases where their enemies are misbehaving), which is really just a way to weaponize the HN mods against their opponents. That's not using the site as intended, either—it just shifts the same problem to a different level.